10.20.04

I've been thinking...

Just read Umberto Eco's Five Moral Pieces which was fascinating. One of the essays was about the futility of war--that it's no longer a chess-like game of move and counter-move--but a catastrophic event where things happen so swiftly and concurrently that antique military strategies cannot cope.

A couple of days ago the headline of the Boregonian had a breathless story about some people who'd been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. Seems that they'd been released after signing affidavits saying that they'd abstain from "acts of aggression" towards the US.

The story in the paper was about how some of these same people had been found to be participating in anti-US activities in various locations. The story said, shrilly, that these people had signed agreements and that they'd broken their word. Shock, horror.

If some power plucked me from my homeland, stuck me in a chain-link cage, tortured, demeaned, and imprisoned me, you can bet your sweet patootie that I'd sign anything they wanted in exchange for being freed. Then I'd go home, nursing a flame of hatred so bright that it'd rival an arc-welder. And I'd do anything in my power to harm those that had done this.

Why is anyone surprised by this development? What, the US has never gone back on its word? Tell that to the Native Americans. As if the US has some finer grade of morality that allows it to behave with impunity.

It boggles the mind that anyone could be so naive, or even pretend to be so naive.

I wonder if the Shrub is dealing with an Oedipal/inferiority complex. I wonder how history will view him and his administration. Is it a proto-fascism?

I haven't read this book, The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton, but found it referenced as I searched for quotes about fascism. According to Paxton's criteria, "Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Hmmm. There I go. Thinking again.

Back one. ||||| Forward one.